I am fairly new to ARM development. Not quite sure where to post this - so I am starting here..
I have a virtualized chip (using QEMU) that has few R5 cores and few A53 cores. This physical chip is/will be designed for a specific purpose. I would like to run the virtualized environment on ARM based hardware so I can use KVM for performance gain. I can run it on x86 right now, but translating the instruction sets takes away from performance.
1. From scouring the internet, I see that both A53 and ThunderX are ARMv8-A. Can I safely assume if I buy a ThunderX workstation/server that any A53 code can run natively?
2. I understand that R5 and A53 has differences - especially in memory handing. Will R5 code run without problem on A53/ThunderX cores? Would be nice if I can use KVM for both core types so instructions can run natively on underlying ARM hardware (A53/ThunderX).
3. Finally, I cannot seem to find a good (powerful) ARM workstation/server that I can just buy. I saw an Ampere eMAG (www.avantek.co.uk/.../), but says it is just an engineering samples. About the only thing I can find is (https://www.asacomputers.com/Cavium-ThunderX-ARM.html), but I am not sure how good that company is. I need a server/workstation with as many cores as possible. My application is compute intensive - so processor speed matters as well.
Any help or direction will be greatly appreciated.